The majority's per curiam (unsigned) opinion focuses entirely on standing, a principle rooted in Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution that gives federal courts the authority to resolve only actual "cases" and "controversies."
Courts have historically understood that to mean that a plaintiff must prove a concrete, particularized injury to have the right to sue in federal court. That injury must be imminent or already happening.
"So, if I think you were speeding when you went into your office this morning, I can't sue in federal court because it's none of my business," David Super, a Georgetown Law professor, explained.
In other words, the alleged harm must be real and specific, not abstract. As the late Justice Antonin Scalia famously put it, “what’s it to you?”
That can be a high hurdle.
Just ask the anti-abortion doctors who tried to take mifepristone off the market, the Republican-led states that challenged the Biden administration’s outreach to social media platforms to take down COVID-19 and election-related content, or the Democratic-led states that just recently hoped to block Trump’s executive order targeting mail ballots.
Each time, the Supreme Court ruled they had no legal standing.
Standing doctrine is complicated, with many different tracks.
In the ballroom lawsuit, the Justice Department and a preservationist group have fought over whether one of its member’s concerns about the project can be likened to environmental groups that the Supreme Court has previously authorized.
"The court has recognized in the past that aesthetic problems, that not being able to do things you like to do even if it isn't immediately associated with money, is injury," Super said.
That concept was cemented in a 1972 case called Sierra Club v. Morton, in which Justice Potter Stewart wrote that aesthetic and environmental wellbeing are "important ingredients of the quality of life in our society."
Scalia, the late conservative icon, would tighten the requirements of that precedent decades later in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife. The landmark 1992 case stated that generalized grievances were not enough to establish standing.
In 2000, the high court ruled in Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services Inc. that an environmental organization had standing to sue over concerns about discharges from a wastewater treatment plant into a South Carolina river.
At the time, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg pointed to how its members said they were being forced to abandon fishing and other activities in the area. The late liberal justice wrote that the alleged harmful pollutants “directly affected” their “recreational, aesthetic, and economic interests.”
When the court decided Summers v. Earth Island Institute nine years later, Scalia in his majority opinion acknowledged that environmental harm can create standing “if that harm in fact affects the recreational or even the mere esthetic interests of the plaintiff.”
The ballroom case dissenters — the court’s liberal wing plus Chief Justice John Roberts — found the comparison apt. They said a historic preservationist is aesthetically injured by the transformation of a historic building like the White House, just like an environmentalist suffers from an animal’s extinction.
The five-justice majority viewed the preservationists’ issue with the 90,000-square-foot ballroom as nothing more than “distaste.” The opinion suggested their theory would allow virtually any citizen to sue when the government does something they don’t like.
"The majority here believes the principle of limiting the court's jurisdiction is more important than the principle of following the law," Super said.
He suggested that for Roberts, it was "too radical" to allow “obviously illegal activity go forward based on a extremely narrow reading of standing.”
"The chief [is] not a liberal on standing issues or on environmental issues by any means, but this move was just too extreme for the chief justice's taste, and certainly for the three liberals."
The 5-4 decision means the ballroom can move ahead full steam with its nearly around-the-clock construction unless someone else can convince the justices they have standing.
It’s not clear anyone will. In 2013, Justice Samuel Alito reaffirmed the Supreme Court’s decades-long principle that assuming no one would have standing is not a reason to relax the requirement.
"The court has occasionally allowed some pretty exotic forms of standing," Super said. "But I think the greater likelihood is that this will only be litigated if a majority of at least one chamber of Congress decides that it is offensive."
With Republicans in control of Congress, there’s no current political will for Congress to try to assert standing as an institution. And for any Democrats who want to try it alone, they’ll have to grapple with the limits the Supreme Court placed on individual lawmaker suits in its 1997 Raines v. Byrd decision.
It leaves President Trump taking the win.
"I am pleased to report that the United States Supreme Court has just ruled in favor of the Ballroom/Military Complex being built without any further contingency, doubt, or threat," the president wrote on Truth Social. "When completed in the Summer of 2028, the magnificent Ballroom and Military Complex will be something that the entire Country is very proud of."
Welcome to The Gavel, The Hill’s weekly newsletter unpacking the intersection of courts & politics from Zach Schonfeld and Sophie Brams. Email us tips at zschonfeld@thehill.com and sbrams@thehill.com. You can also reach out to us on X (@ZachASchonfeld and @sophiebrams) or Signal (zachschonfeld.48 and sbrams.32).
No comments:
Post a Comment